Strategy

Strategy without grounding is just guessing. My approach starts with understanding the landscape, who the users are, where competitors fall short, and what the business genuinely needs to achieve, then framing the problem clearly before jumping to solutions. A good example of this was an initiative at CommBank to connect retail customers and small business customers through the mobile app, identifying a real but underserved opportunity to let everyday banking customers discover and support local businesses, and shaping that opportunity into a coherent, prioritised direction the team could build toward.

I believe good strategy has to be visual and communicable. A vision that lives only in a document isn't a vision; it's a report. I work hard to translate strategic thinking into artefacts that teams can rally around: opportunity maps, prioritised backlogs, and clear product narratives. This was the approach behind a CommBank initiative to improve the branch experience for customers, staff, and technology use. Branch observations formed the core of this work, supplemented by research into how competitors and adjacent industries set up their physical storefronts. From this, I helped map out a prioritised set of technology opportunities, weighing customer value against technical feasibility and business value to land on a clear sequence of what to pursue first.

Both projects required balancing bold thinking with commercial pragmatism, being ambitious about the opportunity, while staying realistic about sequencing, feasibility, and what the business could actually commit to. Translating that balance into a direction the whole team could believe in is, to me, what good strategy work looks like.